"After a lifetime of taking care of his impossible but irresistible sister and his cherished niece, Tom is finally ready to put himself first. An architect specializing in tiny houses, he finally has an opportunity to build his masterpiece--"his last shot at leaving a footprint on the dying planet." Assuming, that is, he can stick to his resolution to keep the demands of his needy family at bay. Naturally, that's when his phone rings. His niece, Cecily--the...

"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction...

"A novel about a young woman's life-altering affair with a much older, married woman."--

"One daring to-do list and a crash course in flirtation turn a Type A overachiever's world upside down. When her flailing department lands on the university's chopping block, Professor Naya Turner's friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she'll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect...

"When Corie Geller asked her parents to move from their apartment into the suburban McMansion she shares with her husband and teenage daughter, she assumed they'd fit right in with the placid life she'd opted for when she left the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI. But then her dad gets a call from genial and slightly nerdy film professor, April Brown--one of the victims of the case he was never able to solve. When April was five years old, she'd...

When Polly falls in love with Marshall, a restoration architect who is helping to rebuild New Orleans, shadows of the past rise out of the poisoned ground as thick and deadly as the toxic waters of the flood. Some crimes are doomed to repeat themselves... only the victims' names change.

On the day Joanne Kilbourn retires from her university teaching post, she has a dream about her first husband (murdered many years ago). Soon, she is forced to experience the truth of what, for most of her life, had just been a good closing line for a political speech. The night after Jo and Zack have dinner with Zack's colleague Margot and one of his law firm's biggest clients, the developer Leland Hunter, Jo and Zack's house is blown up. They're...

"The sudden sinking of a Thames passenger craft with no survivors is seen simply as freak, unexplained accident. But when the male statues of London start crying blood and a choking fog descends causing a passenger plane to crash into the Thames Barrier, the country panics. Is London under a terrorist attack - or is something else at work? Professor Juliet Harrington suspects these unexplained incidents are related to 'The Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom',...

"June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for...